Wireless communications is one of the fastest growing technologies. The phenomenal growth of this technology has seen in the recent years has been notably due to the ease of implementation and deployment. Recently, advancements of various wireless technologies in the 2.4 GHz ISM (industrial, scientific and medical) frequency band have been used in numerous electronic devices. This situation has led to the co-channel coexistence of heterogeneous wireless devices, such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Zigbee. The sharing of the same frequencies results in the challenging problem of inter-system interference between wireless technologies using the ISM frequency band.
This problem of the radio interference between wireless technologies is often treated by detecting and avoiding interference, namely by changing the current working frequency to another frequency expected to suffer less from interference than the current one. US application 20130077552 describes such a method and apparatus for avoiding frequency interference in a local area wireless network when each member device detects the frequency interference. However, for instance, when wireless local area network (WLAN) interference (e.g. a Wi-Fi interference) occurs on a wireless personal area network (WPAN), such as Zigbee, RF4CE and 6LoWPAN, some or entire clusters members of the WPAN may have difficulty in communicating with their cluster head. In fact, this may cause to generate broken clusters.
Also, because the frequency resources in the ISM frequency band are scarce, changing from a current frequency to another one is not always possible. Additionally, switching the operation of several nodes of a network at once, generates considerable extra cost to the network. Particularly, when there are several interferers in the vicinity operating at different channels. In this case, channel switching may happen very often, thus leading to unstable operation of the network. This situation is problematic, especially where critical messages need to be transmitted to all nodes of a wireless network, such as in a Zigbee network.
It would then be advantageous to provide a new mechanism for enabling critical messages to be transmitted to all nodes of a wireless network where it is difficult or not possible to avoid detected frequency interference.